Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Rimfire Falling Plate MAtch at CWSA - 03/05/2008

"It was a dark and stormy day. Suddenly a shot rang out......."

Followed by lots more, as it was a rimfire falling plate match at Central Whidbey Sportsman's Assn. range in Coupeville, Washington. The match format is simple. Each shooter shoots against every other shooter three times. You have to shoot the large plates first, and the small plate last. The first shooter to knock over all six plates wins the run. You get a point for each win, half a point for a tie, and a goose egg for each loss. The shooter with the most points at the end of the day wins.

Tony C. was clearly the fastest shooter of the day, but he was missing some of his shots. "Evil Al" was right there with Tony in terms of speed, and wasn't missing very many at all. I was shooting slower that Tony and Al, but I wasn't missing too many plates. If I was going to have any chance against these two I had better not miss, as I couldn't keep up in terms of raw speed. It was obvious that just about everyone was really shooting well as there were lots of very close runs and even a number of them that were so close they were called ties.

Here's a small video to give you an idea of the speed the plates get knocked down. The quality is down a bit as this was taken with a phone, rather than a regular camera. Even so, you get the idea!

Six shots, six plates. Wish I could do that every time!(Thanks to Scott for the video)

These falling plate matches are lots of fun as you get to shoot lots, and there's only a few minutes wait and you're back up to shoot some more.

As an experiment, each of the four plate racks was set up with the stop plate in a different spot. It turned out that some lanes were faster and easier than others, so the luck of the draw came into play as to which lane you got against which opponent. The table that gave everyone the most trouble was number two, shown in the above video.I got really lucky and got the easiest table against both Tony and Al who had to shoot a more difficult table, table number two. That was just enough for me to sneak past the both of them. KeeWee was shooting more like she normally does, and ended up 7th. overall.

It was a blustery, chilly, and damp day, but everyone had a lot of fun in spite of the crummy weather.